liminal

 

Under the heading "Culture" yesterday's issue of The Atlantic has an essay titled "The Eerie Comfort of Liminal Spaces" that broadens my understanding, my seeing. A liminal space is an ineffably tentative place of ongoing transition, maybe eerily neither and both, there and here, then and now, somehow already and not yet. For a religious or spiritual person, it may be a holy place, the edge of the Kingdom. One may have been there once or many Times. It may Seem for one person, yet not at all for another. A New Testament Greek word might be ἴδωσιν they see, perceive. 

It may be physical, such as the place one went to college or summer camp or the place one had a life changing experience. It may be in the mind, a particular memory into which one can transport and actually be there again. It's a sense. It may be Was or Might Have Been.

Not scary or creepy or horrifying (the rental house in Idaho where four students were stabbed to death is being demolished as an essential purging, and the land given for other use). But it isn't necessarily lovely and dramatic - - could be stepping into an abandoned and trashed empty mall where one used to shop for Christmas, or have dinner in the cafeteria with loved ones, or go to the movies with a long ago sweetheart. 

In all that, I have trouble seeing what's liminal and what's nostalgia, because they seem interwoven; and subjective, individual not universal. 

A liminal space may no longer even be there, may have been demolished and replaced, may be a dock or pier that a hurricane swept away, one's childhood home pulled down and a filling station build there. Linda's beloved grandmother's house where her mother grew up was a Publix and parking lot when we drove over to Tuscaloosa to see it again, is the space still liminal, or nostalgic? I don't know.

A mountain overlook where one met God or fell in love and it all comes back every Time you visit, is that liminal or nostalgia? A beloved school building torn down and a housing project built. A neighborhood cafe that when you return is abandoned and shuttered or that a quarter century ago was converted to a parking lot. A church building that when one returns home decades later is a restaurant. My Laughing Place -> on the beach where the Bay washes ashore, a storm battered cedar tree where my father sat in the sand with his grandchildren, and where I went to be alone when Life and Time demanded peace and quiet, prayer and contemplation, cut down by new owners because it was ugly. 

Liminality - - is it just romanticized nostalgia? I don't know. I'm thinking it's a place of the heart, different for each one.